History
The station opened on the Ringbahn on July 17, 1871. The junction with the Nordbahn line to Neubrandenburg was finished on July 10, 1877. From May 1, 1897, Gesundbrunnen also offered access to the Berlin–Stettin line, whose original tracks were shifted southwards to meet the Ringbahn here. On August 8, 1924, Gesundbrunnen was one of the first stations to become part of the Berlin S-Bahn system.
After World War II and the division of Berlin, long-distance train service diminished and was finally discontinued on May 18, 1952. The S-Bahn system was also affected by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, when the network was partitioned into an eastern and western half. After German reunification in 1990, Gesundbrunnen was rebuilt extensively - it did delay the reopening of the rapid transit link to Berlin Schönhauser Allee station until September 17, 2001. In the Pilzkonzept master plan the station was modernized as Berlin's northern long-distance train station and during 2005 there were discussions to rename the station to Nordkreuz (North Cross) reflecting the names of the other long-distance stations on the Ringbahn namely Ostkreuz (East Cross), Südkreuz (South Cross) and Westkreuz (West Cross). The rename did not occur however and the work on the railway hub was completed on May 26, 2006.
Despite its station category 1 the station has no representative entrance building - the old entrance building had been demolished and it had never been replaced giving the new station a peculiar appearance. The area designated for the entrance building is left as a public open space (Hanne-Sobek-Platz). The planning was stopped not only by financial cuts but also due to the existence of the nearby Gesundbrunnen-Center shopping center that was opened in 1997 offering 25000 square meters of shopping facilities plus a direct connection to the railway station. The planning was resumed during 2010 and the construction work on a new entrance building is due to begin by the end of 2011, with the 3300 square meters projected to cost a total of 7.4 million euros.
The station also has a Berlin U-Bahn station, located on the U8. It opened on April 18, 1930 to plans by Alfred Grenander, and served as an air-raid shelter during World War II.
Read more about this topic: Berlin-Gesundbrunnen Station
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)